How to Get Started Using Aptana Studio 3 for ArcPy Development (Screencast)

Just put together a short (10 min) video of how to set up Aptana Studio 3 and it's Pydev module for developing python scripts that use ESRI's ArcPy module. Let me know what you think!

Cross-posted on http://gis.utah.gov/developer/.

From Tinkerer to Developer; Or How I Got My Dream Job

Today I got an interesting email from a GIS Analyst in Baltimore

Mr. Davis, 

I am a GIS Specialist who is wrapping up an MS in GIS and looking forward to applying my newly acquired skills to projects here at Baltimore City’s DOT. I recently stumbled onto your blog (http://geospatialscott.blogspot.com/) through an esri forum posting (http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/32892-Google-Streetview-and-Javascript-api) and was quite impressed with the breadth of your programming skills and abilities. 

I was asked if I could try to create a program that would display accident history reports based on intersections in a GIS. My GIS application development experience is limited to what I learned through my coursework and I do not have a programming background. My question for you is how did you go about developing your programming skills as a GIS professional? Do you know of any resources that might aid me in going from a GIS analyst to a creative GIS developer like yourself? I see a heavy need for this type of GIS Developer work here at Baltimore DOT and I would like to contribute as much as possible, utilizing all the skills and resources available to me. 

I’m sure you are super busy, but any suggestions or input would be much appreciated from this aspiring GIS(lowercase)p. 

Thank you in advance, [name withheld]

This caused me to reflect upon the past few years and how I've arrived at such an awesome job. I work for the Utah AGRC as a Geospatial Developer and I love my job. There are very few days that I'm not excited to get to work and create something cool. Every day I'm challenged by new problems to solve through code.

I've worked in my current position for almost two years and am just now becoming comfortable calling myself a developer. This is because I'm entirely self-taught and am naturally self-conscience about my knowledge and skill as a developer. My formal education was in Geography with an emphasis in GIS; no computer science classes at all. I started my career as a GIS Analyst working for several local municipalities.

Here are a few things that I think have contributed to my transformation from a GIS Analyst that had no programming experience to a Geospatial Developer.

30 Minutes Per Day

At the beginning of every GIS job that I have had I have always asked my supervisor if he would allow me to spend 30 minutes per day on learning something new. Universally the response has been, "Really!? You want to better yourself!? Heck yes you can." OK, that may not be the exact wording, but you get the idea. My managers have always been happy to give me that time. I believe that it's because they see it as an investment in their employee.

You Gotta Love it Baby

In order to have the motivation to teach yourself something as complicated and frustrating as programming you have to enjoy it. Find something that excites you and then learn about it. If you are not excited to learn about it, you better move on to something else.

"Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day; teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime." - David Leinweber

— Programming Wisdom (@CodeWisdom) June 19, 2012

Learn By Doing Real Work

It's important to me to learn by doing something related to a real project rather than a demo or example project. This helps me stay invested in it as well as lets me know if this technology will really work for my environment. For example, recently I've been reading about backbone.js. Instead of trying to work through an example project that has not relation to anything that I would ever build, I've been reading through the examples and trying to translate them into one of my current projects. By doing this I'm finding that backbone may not be the best solution for my projects. I'm not sure that I would have come to this conclusion as quickly if I had buried myself in demos. Demo's are super useful for showing me how something works, but if I'm writing something, I want it to be connected to my world.

Find a Yoda

Having someone smarter than you to whom you can ask questions is a necessity. I really feel like this is what has made the difference for me. It was only when I was able to get past my own self-conscientiousness and ask smart people questions that I really felt like I made progress. 

Fortunately, in my experience, most programmers are more than happy to give you a little advice and point you in the right direction. I've had several 'famous' JavaScript people respond to my questions on twitter within minutes.

The best ones won't give you the answer right away, but will give you just enough info for you to find the answer on your own. @SteveAGRC is a master at this and has been a great mentor for me. As he would say, "you don't learn anything by keeping your mouth shut."

So I hope that this is a beginning to an answer for my new friend in Baltimore. Maybe a later post will be about specific languages and technologies that I think are the best to learn (JavaScript & Python). If you have any other suggestions for this aspiring developer, please leave a comment.

Phonegap + Leaflet + TileMill = Offline Mobile Maps

Recently I've been researching a mobile project that will require offline-capable base maps. After unsuccessfully finding a solution already built I decided to try wire together Phonegap, Leaflet, and TileMill's .mbtiles. After a few late nights I was able to see it come together and sent out a quick tweet. This has generated quite a few requests for more information so I threw up a repo on GitHub to demo what I was able put together.

The main idea is to download the .mbtiles to the device using Phonegap's File API. Since .mbtiles are just sqlite databases I was able to use a SQLitePlugin to open them up (thanks, coomsie!). I did run into a problem getting this plugin to read BLOB fields from the .mbtiles database. However, after a bit of poking I was able to get it to work.

Once I had access to the encoded image data it was only a matter of writing a custom leaflet tile layer (TileLayer.MBTiles.js) inspired by a similar one that coomsie had done. One of the big secrets was passing {scheme: 'tms'} into the constructor.

Initially the performance was quite good on the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4 that I tried it out on. However, after cleaning up the project in preparation for uploading it to Github, the performance has suffered a bit. Not sure what I did, but I'll post an update when I get it figured out.

This is my first experience with Phonegap and Objective-C so any suggestions for improvements would be greatly appreciated.

[Added on 4-26-12]
P.S. The app downloads the .mbtiles file automatically from my dropbox account the first time that it runs and stores it in the Documents folder locally. Each subsequent time that it runs it uses this local file. So after the initial download you should be able to open up the app and see tiles while in air-plane mode.